Old and New Masters eBook

The White Cockade, the second of the tragic
comedies, is a play about the flight of King James
II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too, is
lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical.
King James himself is a good comic figure of a conventional
sort, as he is discovered hiding in the barrel; but
Sarsfield, who is meant to be heroic, is all joints
and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet
who might have been invented by any writer of plays.
“When my White Cockade was produced,”
Lady Gregory tells us, “I was pleased to hear
that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing
of historical drama again possible.” But
surely, granted the possession of the dramatic gift,
the historical imagination is the only thing that makes
the writing of historical drama possible. Lady
Gregory does not seem to me to possess the historical
imagination. Not that I believe in archaeology
in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters,
she cannot give us the illusion of reality about the
figures in these historical plays. If we want
the illusion of reality, we shall have to turn from
The White Cockade to the impossible scene outside
the post-office and the butcher’s shop in Hyacinth
Halvey. As for the third of the tragic comedies,
The Deliverer, it is a most interesting curiosity.
In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in
a setting of the Egypt of the time of Moses.
Moses himself—­or the King’s nursling,
as he is called—­is Parnell; and he and the
other characters talk Kiltartan as to the manner born.
The Deliverer is grotesque and, in its way,
impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King’s
nursling is thrown to the King’s cats by his
rebellious followers, invites parody. The second
volume of the Irish Folk-History Plays, even
if it reveals only Lady Gregory’s talent rather
than her genius, is full of odd and entertaining things,
and the notes at the end of both of these volumes,
short though they are, do give us the franchise of
a wonderful world of folk-history.

XXI

MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary
literature. He is also a grandee of revolutionary
politics. Both in literature and in politics
he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge
more than any other man now writing. Other men
challenge us with Utopias, with moral laws and so
forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet
or the moralist about him. He expresses himself
better in terms of his hostilities than in terms of
visionary cities and moralities such as Plato and
Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light
and fire. It is a temperament, indeed, not a
vision or a logic, that Mr. Graham has brought to
literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside
the walls of a score of Jerichos:—­Jerichos
of empire, of cruelty, of self-righteousness, of standardized
civilization—­and he seems to do so for
the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels
that if all the walls of all the Jerichos were suddenly
to collapse before his trumpet-call he would be the
loneliest man alive. For he is one of those for
whom, above all, “the fight’s the thing.”